The CBB

How does the grid work? Could you elaborate?

Man in Space wrote: ↑16 Mar 2023 21:47 The first new Caber logograms in like a year and a half.

My bad - I thought you said the Caber logograms are a year and a half old; I was about to congratulate them and you on the birthday.

As to the new ones - they're quite nice.

Creyeditor wrote: ↑21 Aug 2023 12:35 How does the grid work? Could you elaborate?

So the Caber grid works like this:

- The glyphic space proper is square, with twenty-four units therein (plus the starting edge on the left, which is considered zero).
- Your first primary division is that of the quadrant. The center point is singled out specifically as an option.
- The green lines, taken with the red ones, are your primary subdivisions of the glyphic space. Most Caber logographic strokes anchor to points along the intersection of two of the red or green lines.
- The blue lines divide the quadrants into fourths. These are much less broadly used; their main purposes are to give you a basis for drawing the stick-figure or animal radicals (since quadrupeds would look ridiculous otherwise) or for compression of compounded radicals (notably, the phonetics are presented at full size; it’s the semantics that are vertically shortened to accommodate them).

I haven’t decided on native terminology for most of this yet.

Keenir wrote: ↑21 Aug 2023 14:04

Man in Space wrote: ↑16 Mar 2023 21:47 The first new Caber logograms in like a year and a half.

My bad - I thought you said the Caber logograms are a year and a half old; I was about to congratulate them and you on the birthday.

As to the new ones - they're quite nice.

Thank you!

Man in Space wrote: ↑22 Aug 2023 04:32

Creyeditor wrote: ↑21 Aug 2023 12:35 How does the grid work? Could you elaborate?

So the Caber grid works like this:

- The glyphic space proper is square, with twenty-four units therein (plus the starting edge on the left, which is considered zero).
- Your first primary division is that of the quadrant. The center point is singled out specifically as an option.
- The green lines, taken with the red ones, are your primary subdivisions of the glyphic space. Most Caber logographic strokes anchor to points along the intersection of two of the red or green lines.
- The blue lines divide the quadrants into fourths. These are much less broadly used; their main purposes are to give you a basis for drawing the stick-figure or animal radicals (since quadrupeds would look ridiculous otherwise) or for compression of compounded radicals (notably, the phonetics are presented at full size; it’s the semantics that are vertically shortened to accommodate them).

I haven’t decided on native terminology for most of this yet.

So, the line intersections serve as anchor points for strokes and the fourths serve as a base for human or animal radicals. Plus, they help you scale. That sounds like a neat multi-purpose tool.

Since I’m hamstrung by technical difficulties at work, a redone phonology for CC:

/m n/ m n
/p b t d tɕ dʑ k g/ p b t d q j c g
/f s z ɕ x/ f s z ç h
/v~w ɾ ʑ~j/ v r gi/ge

{k,g}E > j / _V
{k,g}E > j / V_
k g x > tɕ j ɕ / _E
t d > tɕ dʑ / _{v,w}

/a ɛ ə ɔ i ɨ u/ a e ŏ o i ŭ u

Syllable structure is (C)V(C) with the addition of the following permissible clusters:

/bɾ- ts-~tɾ- dz-~dɾ- ɾs- ks- kɾ-~kj- gɾ-~gj-/ bd tr dr rs x cr gr
/ft- fk- fs-~fɾ- vd-~vɾ- ɾd- kt-/ vt vc vr vd rd ct
/bn- vn- dn- dʑn- gn- ksn-~gzn-/ bn vn dn jn gn xn
/bɣ-~bj- vg-~vɣ-~vj- tx- dɣ-~dj- ɾg-~ɾj- tɕk- dʑg-/ bg vg tg dg rg qg jg
/mw- vw-~bw-~bv- nw- ɾw-~dɾw-~dzw-/ mv bv nv dv
/tɕw-~tɕv- dʑw-~dʑv- kw- gw-/ qv jv cv gv
/ɾdw-~ɾdv- ɾdg-~ɾd͜ʑ- kst- ktɾ-~kts-~ktj- ktn- ktj-~kt͜ɕ-/ rdv rdg xt ctr ctn ctg(i)

FINALS
/-ts -ks -sk/ q x sc
/-ntɕ -ndʑ/ nq nj
/-ŋk -ŋks/ nc nx
/-ɾk -ɾks/ rc rx

…it really has come a long way, hasn't it?

New glyphs to come.

Also: One way of doing related logograms—glyph inversion.

Caber scribal exercises:

The first 834 non-prepositional glyphs have been digitized.

Do you have an image or something that shows all of them?

clawgrip wrote: ↑06 Jan 2025 08:33 Do you have an image or something that shows all of them?

Nice to see you back, clawgrip.

No, I don't have any such image, unfortunately.

(I ended up changing brush settings mid-writing this post, hence why some look like Caber Helvetica and others more calligraphied. It's late and I don't want to have to fix it right now.)

1. erx /ɛɾks/
   1. n. Tear, tears, lachrymal discharge.
   2. n. Teardrop, mote or particle of tears.
2. irx /iɾks/
   1. n. Tint, tinge.
   2. n. Hue, color, shade.
3. orx /ɔɾks/
   1. n. Worker insect.

1. arxcric /aɾkskɾik ~ aɾkskjik/
   1. n. Caber myth or legend.
   2. n. Generational and/or cultural knowledge.
   3. n. Druidic canon.
2. de /dɛ/
   1. adj. Dear, beloved, cherished, close.
3. ectro /ɛktɾɔ ~ ɛktsɔ ~ ɛktjɔ/
   1. n. Tradition, habit, custom.
   2. n. Transmissible information; meme.
4. gectar /jɛktaɾ ~ ʑɛktaɾ/
   1. n. Casualty, death as a result of s.t..
   2. n. Death, loss.
   3. n. Discharge, jettison, ejecta.
   4. v. To misplace, to put s.t. down s.w. and then forget where one has put it, to lose track of.

Here we have a case of a single glyph having multiple readings. This occasionally happened in the system, but other methods include phonetic radicals. Of these, there are two strata—a simpler, older form that represented only the first consonant via an addition to the bottom third or so of the glyph and that sort of became "fossilized" by the time the second came around, and a later, more complex form that had radicals of various shapes and orientations come by.



One of the quirks is that the phonetic radical BŎ came from the term bŏncfeu 'xenchromatonuria', a disease of the adasar characterized by yellow or orange urine. (Dahsar urine is typically reddish given the high iron in the environment. Dahsar blood is purple when oxygenated and clear-ish when spent, so this doesn't paper over blood in the urine, but still, vin rose.)



So, for example:



BŎ + CAQ 'think, reason' = bŏden 'science, field, profession, practice, art, vocation'
BŎ + BAÇAM 'pick a fight, instigate' = bŏnqov 'fix, conspiracy, harassment, abuse'

In the latter example above, note how both the phonetic and the semantic have had their proportions changed. This is due to the riq 'checkerboard, checked; (here) grid' system.

CC stroke order generally starts from the bottom left and works its way left-to-right and bottom-to-top per character. Some complexes may be considered a single stroke (for example, when drawing the "feet" of the glyph of the dude standing, that's typically done in one stroke no matter whether there is one or more than one figure in the glyphic space).

Just quickly while I'm on my lunch break:

A full slate of phonetic radicals:



Left to right: MA, ME, MŎ, MO, MI, MŬ, MU.

And here's another:



Left to right: NA, NE, NŎ, NO, NI, NŬ, NU.

Same order each line for the vowels. Top to bottom: Ø, P, B, T, D, Q, J, C, G.



















The two missing glyphs (where one would expect CE and CI) are because single /k/ as an onset for these vowels is disallowed (it'd become Q). The glyphs for GE and GI are used to represent that sound, which has reduced from the full syllable it used to be to the approximant or voiced sibilant that it became at the time CC was spoken.

The rest of the singleton radicals: F, S, Z, Ç, H, V, R.















Again, no HE or HI because these would become ÇE and ÇI.

Stroke order diagrams for selected glyphs.

Top row: BD series
Bottom row: TR series

Forgive me if you've explained it already, but can you explain and show examples of how the phonetic radicals work, and maybe how some of them were derived?

Reading this kind of makes me want to start working on my own Fkeuswa script again, which I haven't touched since 2019 apparently, judging from the file info. It looks like I never made a Himmaswa thread, though.

Also, I just want to point out that your imgur image links display fine on my phone, but are broken on my PC (both in Firefox and Chrome).